They are two now

Conjoined twins Stuti and Aradhna were successfully separated after a 12-hour complex surgery conducted by a team of 34 medical experts, including 23 doctors, drawn from India and abroad.

The complicated surgical procedure was carried out at Missionary Hospital in Padhar here.

The one-year-old sisters, who were joined at heart and liver, were wheeled into the operation theatre at around 8 am. The actual surgery began at 9 am and it lasted till around 9 pm, hospital sources said.

Stuti was first to be wheeled out of the operation theatre. Both have been kept on ventilators and they will be under close medical observation for about 48 hours, they said.

In a four-phase operation, the twins were first given anaesthesia. After nearly two hours, a team of surgeons separated their heart which was again transplanted into them in two pieces.

During the third phase, surgeons separated their livers through a critical surgery. In the last phase, their other body parts were separated and sealed as required under such surgeries, the sources said.

Stuti was finally separated from Aradhna and was kept in the ICU, while Aradhna remained inside the operation theatre.

The sisters were born on May 2, 2011 to Maya Yadav, a resident of Chudiya village under Chicholi block of Betul district.

Since the woman and her husband, a poor farmer, were unable to bear the huge expenses required for the delicate surgery, they donated them to the hospital.

The hospital management readily accepted them and decided to go for the surgery for which they contacted doctors, some of them from abroad.

A group of doctors, including Albert Shoon, Gordan Thomas, Sanjeev Peter and Dhruv Ghosh, conducted the surgery. The team also included medical experts from Ludhiana, Chennai, Gujarat, Vellore (Tamil Nadu), Bangalore and Australia. This was perhaps first such surgery performed in Madhya Pradesh and the operation had attracted a lot of public and media attention.